Telling stories

Let me tell you a true story.

It’s late at night, and a middle-aged white dude is walking through a deserted Brooklyn neighborhood. Almost a block away, a young black man walks towards him on the same side of the street. As the black man draws closer, the white man crosses mid-street to the opposite sidewalk. The young man isn’t shocked. He’s been avoided before. But hold on? Maybe he’s being unfair. Maybe the white guy just lived in that direction and was doing a quick New York jaywalk. You shouldn’t always assume racism.

And then he glances behind him and sees the white man cross back over the street to the same side of the sidewalk. Wow. Not very subtle. No doubt now. That whole maneuver just to avoid a black face. Racist.

And he’s right, of course. There can’t be any reasonable explanation. No excuse for the white dude’s otherwise strange behavior. It’s a clear example of racism. Sure, you could maybe argue it’s understandable. An older white guy might feel vulnerable. But it’s still racism.

Except that’s not what happened.

First, I’m the white guy. You guessed that, right?

I was walking home late at night after buying chips¹ at a weird little weed shop that sold snacks but had a crap selection of soda. I needed Diet Dr. Pepper to wash down my salty fix,² so I crossed mid-street to head towards a well-supplied bodega. After walking a few dozen steps, I suddenly remembered I already had a 2-liter bottle of soda at home! Silly me. I stepped back across the same street to the sidewalk I had just left and headed homeward. Zero racism intended.

Also, there probably wasn’t any young black man. I was tired and might not have noticed if there were, but I don’t remember seeing anyone. As I walked home, however, it occurred to me that my actions would have looked pretty damn strange to anybody who didn’t have access to my muddled interior monologue. And if there had been a young black man walking towards me, I don’t see how he could help but see my actions as racist. And if he later told his story to his friends, any of them denying that it was racism would have been met with incredulity, perhaps even accusations of gaslighting. It was obviously racism!

What’s the point of all this?

It’s a reminder that way too many of us think we’re mindreaders who can figure out what is going on behind someone else’s eyes from a brief conversation, a snippet of video, a single tweet. Our pattern-seeking brains take those few data points and create elaborate stories about villains and victims, and we’re often horribly wrong.

Think about the Covington mess. If you don’t remember, it was a viral video of a bunch of white kids (some in MAGA hats) dancing around a native elder, seemingly ridiculing him. They were obnoxious punks from Covington Catholic High School in Washington to protest against abortion. The smug, smirking face of Nicholas Sandmann was freeze-framed in a dozen stories. I vaguely remember posting something about his punchable mug on Facebook. Many of my friends did the same. And we soon found out that the story was all wrong. A longer video emerged that showed the kids chilling for hours, occasionally harangued by some Black Hebrew Israelites³, and then, at the very end, Nathan Philips, the elder, marches into the midst of the confused boys banging his drum at them, creating a confrontation out of thin air.⁴ The boys had been wronged by a liberal media eager to fit the story into a narrative of racism by arrogant MAGA supporters.

Robby Soave covered this well for Reason.

In hindsight, the slanted nature of the coverage is almost comical. The Detroit Free Press described the video as depicting "Phillips peacefully drumming and singing, while surrounded by a hostile crowd" and suggested that this "illustrates the nation's political and racial tensions." The Daily Beast's story was filed under "AWFUL" and described the video as "disturbing." Its first several paragraphs quote directly from Phillips. NPR asserted that the boys had mocked the Native American man. In story after story, news outlets claimed the Covington kids had shouted "build the wall." Again, the sole source of this claim was Phillips.
“A Year Ago, the Media Mangled the Covington Catholic Story,” Reason (January 21, 2020)

And even after the full video made it clear that the media (and observers like myself) had gotten the story wrong, some people were so committed to believing the first story that they refused to change. Laura Wagner, writing for Deadspin, was among many who doubled down on her initial take, calling critics “gaslighters.”

“Nothing about the video showing the offensive language of Black Israelites changes how upsetting it was to see the Covington students, and Sandmann in particular, stare at Phillips with such contempt,” wrote Wagner. “I don't see how you could watch this and think otherwise unless you're willing to gaslight yourself, and others, in the service of granting undeserved sympathy to the privileged.”

Wagner probably isn’t a bad person; she was just high on partisanship and stuck on the original narrative. (I bet some people thought she was evil based on that single article, thereby playing the same mind-reading game she was playing. “Only a bad person would write an article like that!”)

Every year there are dozens, hundreds of “obvious” stories that aren’t obvious at all.

Think about last year when Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, was brutally attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant in his San Francisco home. With nothing to go on but some early garbled police reports, right-wingers spewed bizarre conspiracy theories that Pelosi knew his attacker, that the attacker was wearing underwear, that they were gay lovers, that both men had hammers, that the police were covering it up, “show us the video.”

I argued with some of these people on Twitter, and they stubbornly defended their factless theories. They knew. It was all obvious!

When the police bodycam video finally came out, it showed none of the stories were true. The two men didn’t know each other, the intruder wasn’t in his underwear, and there was only one hammer. Rather than a sordid encounter, the video showed an old man brutally attacked. This silenced all but the most dedicated conspiracy theorists, but I doubt if they felt any regret. They moved on to the next story to create based on zero evidence.

And some people will never stop. This essay isn’t for them. It’s for the folks with some degree of self-awareness, the ones who deplore lies told in the name of advancing a narrative but who are human and so sometimes fall to this tendency. This essay is a reminder, to them and to me, that we aren’t good at drawing conclusions from limited evidence, an image, a video clip, or some white guy’s strange behavior walking down the street. We suck at figuring out what really happened and who the bad guys are.

Making judgments about people’s inherent wickedness without that sort of extreme data is a mug’s game. You don’t know enough about people to know their circumstances and how they got there.

1. Fritos Chili Cheese Corn Chips, the bane of my existence. So many chemicals, so damn tasty.

2. It’s a perfect pairing, like white wine with fish or red wine with duck.

3. The Black Hebrew Israelites are a fringe religious movement that claims black people are the true Israelites. Many BHI members are anti-semitic and anti-white. They often set up a podium in some crowded location where they can harass passersby.

4. Philips later claimed he had been trying to protect the Black Israelites, but the kids hadn’t been attacking those men; if anything, it was the reverse. His claim that the kids were chanting “build a wall” was not born out by the video evidence. Until he showed up, nothing had been happening.